Excerpt taken from full journal article originally published in Popular Music History.
"The Face was launched in 1980 by Nick Logan. Logan had previously been editor of NME and Smash Hits. At NME he had worked alongside Alan Smith to revamp the magazine in ways that ushered in the era Forde defines as the polyglot years. Upon leaving the IPC title in 1978 he launched Smash Hits for Emap. This was an immediate success and in the first half of 1979 Smash Hits had ABC3 figures of around 166,000 (only 40,000 less than NME). Two years later Logan left Smash Hits and set up The Face using his own money.
Operating initially out of Smash Hits offices, the first issue of The Face appeared in May 1980. Logan describes how he was inspired by the ‘luscious colour’ of Paris Match and that his impetus for The Face was that ‘common people’ should have ‘glossy paper too’ (Gorman 2001: 287). Nominally a music title, the magazine stood out from the ‘inkies’, not just because of its production values, but because it positioned popular music within what Nixon refers to as the wider context of the pop process: ‘the dress codes of pop consumers, together with the design of record sleeves, glamour, the stars and pop video’ (Nixon 1996: 146).
Utopian as this vision might have been, the reality was that The Face addressed a more rarefied constituent of readers than either NME or Smash Hits. Its audience was cohered around a sub-cultural elite of metropolitan fashion police and style cognoscenti (and those who aspired to such status); a group whose identity was articulated in explicit material acts of consumption.
The notion that The Face epitomized something very specific and not entirely pleasant about Britain under Margaret Thatcher has become a recurrent theme in received thinking about the title. Gudmundsson et al. (2002: 56), for example, define The Face as the embodiment of ‘postmodern consumer ideology’. Likewise Mark Kohn argues that The Face was a useful passbook to young ideas for 40-year old advertising executives (Gorman 2001: 289). Elsewhere, ‘style’, in particular, is something that is viewed as problematic. For example, Mort suggests ‘style has been defined as the product of Thatcherism in as much as it involved capitulation to the marketplace’ (Mort 1996: 28).
Consequently, when Emap launched Q in November 1986, the people working on it saw it quite differently to The Face. ‘The Face had gone mad’ commented Cowles (Art Director on early editions of Q magazine) in 1996 ‘and was a really high faulting style title, very 80s’ and on Q he was ‘designing in a way to counterpoint that’. Likewise, Gudmundsson et al. make clear in Q’s earliest incarnation that there was a stark contrast between advertising and editorial, which juxtaposed the synergy of the two pioneered at The Face.
Certainly Q was less avant-garde in its cultural choices; it sought out the established stars—Paul McCartney, Elton John, Mick Jagger etc. It is also widely recognized as having appealed to a new older demographic of popular music enthusiasts who were simultaneously being targeted as potential consumers of the CD. Nevertheless, on a surface level Q bore more than a passing resemblance to The Face. Just as Q positioned itself as a counterpoint to The Face, it was also defined in opposition to the ‘inkies’ such as NME, Sounds and Melody Maker. In an obvious sense this was apparent because it was printed on glossy A4 paper, and large sections were in colour. However, more importantly is the fact that it also shunned the polyglottism of NME and much has been made of the anonymous professional style of Q journalism.
In one sense the similarities between Q and The Face were attributable to the personnel involved; both Mark Ellen (editor) and David Hepworth (editorial director) had been editors of Smash Hits after Logan’s departure. Smash Hits‘ departure from the old-style music press in its use of glossy colour paper would go on to characterize both The Face and Q. Its success was also predicted on the rise of a new sensibility in popular music brought about by groups who were less keen on preserving the distinction between art and commerce. Unlike the music press before it, Smash Hits did not have to work particularly hard to maintain that illusion, but rather it presented itself as complicit in the process of commoditization.
The era of Smash Hits’ ascendancy was 1979 to 1984. These years saw the emergence of what became known as New Pop: ‘Blondie, Police, Jam, Adam, Spandau, Human League, Duran Duran, Culture Club’ (Gorman 2001: 286). As Ellen observed in the 2003 Channel Four documentary broadcast to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Smash Hits, these groups demanded a new medium because ‘they did not work on horrible old inky smudgie broadsheet paper… It only really works pin sharp printed in colour’ (Ellen, 25 Years of Smash Hits, Channel 4, 2003). However, they also embodied an ideological position that was quite counter to the NME of the 1970s. Rimmer, for instance, clearly positioned New Pop in a dialectic with old rockist ideas:
[T]o those who cling on to the spirit of punk, everything about the New Pop is utterly abhorrent and devoid of their precious ‘credibility’. The New Pop isn’t rebellious. It embraces the star system. It conflates art, business and entertainment. It cares more about sales and royalties and the strength of the dollar than anything else and to make matters worse, it isn’t the least bit guilty about it (Rimmer 1985: 13).
It was this anti-NME spirit that really galvanized the editorial after Logan’s departure. Hepworth, for example, suggests that ‘Smash Hits was put together by a bunch of people who couldn’t get anywhere in that NME world’ (Gorman 2001: 291). Consequently, the rationale underpinning Smash Hits was not only to make the journalistic style ‘shorter, tighter and more disciplined’ (ibid. 285), but also less serious. As Hepworth’s comments to Channel Four suggest, under his tenure as editor between 1981 and 1983, Smash Hits purposely celebrated the synthetic and inconsequential: ‘We at Smash Hits are planning to reverse the tide of music coverage entirely in the direction of trivia. Henceforth we are really genuinely interested in the colour of people’s socks’ (Hepworth, 25 Years of Smash Hits, Channel 4, 2003).
So, if The Face was the ultimate manifestation of Smash Hits’ celebration of the surface culture of popular music under Logan, then Q can be viewed as taking the impartial and irreverent tone championed by Hepworth and Ellen to the next level. However, it is the articulation of consumer discourse that has drawn the most attention within the academy. As Mort has argued, Q was first and foremost a consumer lifestyle magazine (Mort 1996: 75). Likewise, Forde suggests that Q’s monoglottic house-style built on that of Smash Hits and was a function of its role ‘as a branded consumer guide’ (2001: 29)."
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